The Cynic: So Israelis are demonstrating because they fear they’ll be arrested overseas for committing war crimes and interrogating Palestinians through torture?
The Fan: What’s your problem? Shin Bet agents, the architects who designed the settlements of Ariel and Ma’aleh Adumim, the lawyers and judges who approved severing the Gaza Strip from the world and the destruction of the villages of – they’re only a minority among the tens of thousands of opponents of this loathsome coup against our system of government.
C: But they’re from the same milieu as the demonstrators. They renounce the bastards in the Border Police and La Familia, but at the same time they want to ensure their children’s future as Shin Bet torturers, spyware developers, bombers of Gaza, lawyers who approve deportations and so forth, without risking arrest when they land in The Hague or Madrid.
F: That’s a demagogic picture of Israeli society. First, Mizrahi Jews are also demonstrating. Second, the majority are people who work hard, salaried employees like you and me, without state-funded pensions, with mortgages and debts and anger at the deteriorating education and health systems. Look at how they managed to undermine the Kohelet Forum’s swinish capitalist arrogance.
C: But they don’t connect the growth of this elitist “research” institution and its takeover of the government to the Jewish supremacist regime that is in force here between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The demonstrators want Israel to continue the dispossession, occupation and racism, but to look to the outside world as if it’s not happening, so we’ll be considered democratic. The coup being perpetrated by Simcha Rothman, Yariv Levin and Bezalel Smotrich simply threatens to destroy this façade.
F: If these laws pass, the settler right will feel even stronger and become even more dangerous. The first and primary victims will be the Palestinians, on both sides of the Green Line. The Knesset will decide not to let Arab parties run in the elections and invent more pretexts for deporting Palestinians. So it’s a good cause even if it isn’t for the right motives.
C: Agreed. But even now, the Palestinians are the main victims of our supposed democracy. And that is something most of the demonstrators, and especially their leaders, don’t see, or else don’t consider important. They are trying to save the façade. They want to ensure that the United States and Germany keep supporting Israel the occupier financially and diplomatically and keep saying that it’s a democracy.
F: The demonstrations are a school for raising people’s consciousness and their political understanding. Look at how they no longer pounce on demonstrators with posters like “there is no democracy with occupation” the way they used to. Look at how the demonstrators were shocked by the Jewish pogrom in Hawara.
C: Thanks a lot. That shock subsided within a week. And where are all the former Shin Bet people who are demonstrating? Have we heard them demand that their friends who are still serving in the army and the police and the prosecution arrest and investigate the Hawara rioters? After all, it’s clear that the authorities know their names and addresses and phone numbers very well from the previous pogroms they perpetrated, after which they weren’t arrested or tried.
F: Actually, you’re not a cynic, but a romantic. You expect the masses to come out against an injustice that they personally haven’t suffered. Okay, okay, an injustice that they are causing, even if only indirectly. But the important thing is, will we see each other tomorrow at the demonstration?